Legendary French actress Catherine Deneuve and over 100 other prominent French women have today written a poignant editorial in Le Monde, warning of a new era of “puritanism” in the wake of the current wave of sexual harassment charges against women. It should force all of us serious thinkers to reexamine the current very valid […]

There Is More To High-Tech Immigration to Canada Than Meets The Eye My long-time business partner and I, one of us in Canada and the other in Silicon Valley, earlier this year launched a business targeted at bringing immigrant entrepreneurs to Canada, Vendange Partners. http://www.vendangepartners.com From our years’of experience in Silicon Valley and with technology entrepreneurship […]

As Fareed Zakaria has pointed out this week in the Washington Post and on CNN GPS, we now have a Trump foreign policy doctrine, and it is not reassuring for the World. Obviously heavily influenced by Bannon, who many had thought had been relegated to backseat status by McMaster, we have been fooled again. As Trump demonstrates his RealPolitik admiration for authoritarians like Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdogan, and Duterte, more sinister scenarios begin to crystallize. Trump’s speech justifying the withdrawal of the United States from the COP21 Paris Climate Change Agreement is a frightening exposition of this new Trump Doctrine. It is Trump thumbing his nose at the World. It is the United States against the World, led by a coterie of plutocrats and their money. The reality is that the evidence points to an ongoing seizure of executive power by Trump that destroys our Constitution in the name of our national security. The question is what we can do about it.

UPDATE: This post from February 21, 2016, is being republished in the light of the announcement that Club Penguin is closing its doors in March. No amount of PR spin, arm waving, or equivocation can make the bitter truth of this post go away. I note that Lane Merrifeld and Accelerate Okanagan have been conspicuously silent. […]

Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election has evolved into a genuine and unprecedented national crisis. The Electoral College meets December 19th. Over the years, the Electoral College has deteriorated into a quant rubber-stamp of each state’s elector outcome. Some states have even passed laws that prohibit electors from changing their votes. However, this is patently un-Constitutional and not the intent of The Founders. Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that the intent was for the Electoral College to be a check on exactly the situation we are facing. Meanwhile, a group of electors has demanded that the CIA share its evidence with the Electoral College.

Italy, Austria, and France, in that order, are the next dominos likely to fall in the global wave of populist political sentiment. Italy and Austria will both go to the polls on the same day next month, December 4th, for somewhat different reasons, but with both outcomes likely to advance the political forces on the right in Europe. In Austria, it’s expected that Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party will prevail. That would make him the first elected far-right leader in Western Europe since 1945. Italy’s vote is a referendum initially scheduled for the fall. On the table is a package of constitutional reforms that Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has proposed to streamline lawmaking, but it is increasingly being seen a plebiscite on Renzi’s government, which it appears he may lose, causing his government to fall, and creating an opportunity for the far right to form a new anti-immigration government. In the upcoming 2017 Presidential election in France, ultra-nationalist Marine Le Pen is seen as the possible front-runner.

We are now seeing the first indications of the consequences of a Trump withdrawal from the international community. China has seen an opportunity to displace the United States and to advance China’s own aspirations to take a more aggressive and visible leadership role in the COP21 agreement. The simultaneous announcement of the de facto death of the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) has also opened a new opportunity for Chinese hegemony in the Asian economic and geopolitical world. Regardless of the Trumpist views on climate change and foreign trade, we are proverbially cutting off our noses to spite our faces.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s extraordinary two-hour National Geographic documentary is now available for viewing free everywhere, including on this page, YouTube, The National Geographic website, and the National Geographic Channel. Everyone should watch it. Equally worthwhile is the series The Years of Living Dangerously on National Geographic. The 2-minute trailer and the full documentary film are below here.

Lost today in the extraordinary news frenzy surrounding the release of a video tape of Donald Trump making unprecedented lewd and obscene comments about women, was Barak Obama’s announcement that the United States officially and publicly accuses Russia of espionage in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, and stealing documents, now in the possession of Wikileaks. Some may recall Julian Assange’s video interview with Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher about a month ago on this topic. It seems clear from the Bill Maher interview that Assange is on a jihad against the DNC because Clinton wanted to prosecute him. Assange has no altruistic motives — it is personal. We have a foreigner trying to influence U.S elections using documents stolen by Russia.

We are witnessing an extraordinary global upheaval, the outcome of which seems very uncertain at best. In my view, it is a populist reaction to globalization, and a dramatic shift in politics around the World, from economic issues to cultural issues. I see globalization as ultimately an inevitable evolution of human culture, but which by its very nature and the acceleration in the pace of change with the World Wide Web, is fomenting unrest and reaction. Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian visionary correctly predicted the rise of the “global village” in the 1960’s. But neither McLuhan nor we foresaw the backlash against the Internet and efforts by China, Russia, Turkey and other countries to block free access to the Internet. The global economy also has essentially stagnated since the Global Financial Meltdown. This has been a warning of greater issues rising up around the World. Xenophobia, racism, gender issues, freedom of expression, environmentalism, and terrorism have displaced economics as the top political issues. How this all plays out in the “global village” is anyone’s guess.

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David Mayes

Founding Partner, Vendange Partners, UBC adjunct faculty, Intel alumni, technology assessment, international business, clean tech, fly fisherman, native Californian and citizen of France, who has been very fortunate to have traveled, lived and worked all over the globe. My wonderful wife, Isabelle has reintroduced me to my French Provencal heritage.